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The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS) is to create a collaborative reference platform and a “one‐stop” shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.

The CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.

The advantages of the CS are its extensibility and modularity that provide the possibility to extend the type of information that can be stored in this system based on user/community needs.

Further investigation still needs to be done on the modularisation of the CS (i.e. the creation of separated ontologies that can still be connected, in order to have domain‐related ontologies and to allow for better performance of the CS).

The CS serves as starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies where multilinguality and the localised representation of knowledge are essential issues. Furthermore, it will offer additional services in order to expose the knowledge to be consumed by other applications.

The CS Workbench provides the AGROVOC partners with the possibility to directly and collaboratively edit the AGROVOC CS. It thus provides the opportunity for direct and open “many‐to‐many” communication links between communities, avoiding decentralised communication between partners and duplication of effort. For the international community, it may allow users to manage, re‐use or extend agriculture‐related knowledge for better interoperability and for improved services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore addressing the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output by means of the AGRIS application profile – an exchange metadata standard – and controlled vocabularies or subject‐specific knowledge organisation systems.

Based on an analysis of the open access (OA) publishing model and the open archives initiative (OAI), the authors share their proposal for the architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology.

The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in food and agricultural sciences represents a significant weakness, limiting the research system to properly help address the issues of agricultural development. The OA publishing model promotes the availability of content online, including grey literature, which is not available through commercial distribution channels but which significantly contributes to agricultural research and development. The new architecture proposed in this paper is based on these OA and OAI paradigms and has three components: the creation of content with agreed content description standards, the harvesting of the content using common exchange standards and the value‐added services provided to the users using the exchanged standard content.

The paper presents how the agricultural sciences and technology community can adopt the OA model and OAI tools. The paper will be useful to information professionals who are planning to improve the accessibility and interoperability of the agricultural research produced in their institution by the creation of institutional repositories.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the papers in the special issue which explores some of the potential, opportunities and challenges to be found in greater library and information science alignment with semantic web developments.

The article is a general review of the papers in the issue.

For many digital libraries or cultural institutions, the semantic web offers an opportunity to better expose valuable digital resources pertaining to research, culture or history, using common standards and technologies in a collaborative and “joined up” way. The papers in this issue “paint a rainbow”, exploring the issues through elements of case studies, reviews research and conceptual expositions and viewpoints.

The article emphasises how the practical implications of semantic web research or developments for digital libraries and repositories is important for LIS professionals.